What Marco Polo Forgot” Contemporary Chinese Art Reconﬁgures the Global

Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 4, August 2012 471

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“What Marco Polo Forgot” Contemporary Chinese Art Reconﬁgures the Global

by Aihwa Ong

In 1995, Cai Guo-Qiang set adrift a Chinese junk on the Grand Canal in Venice, marking the seven-hundredth anniversary of Marco Polo’s return to Europe. In 2008, as the world spiraled into a far-reaching ﬁnancial collapse, a historian warned that in the long haul, “New York could turn into Venice.” These two historical moments set the stage for a discussion of how contemporary Asian art navigates the world of conceptual geography. An anthropology of art expands beyond expertise on “native artifacts” corralled in Western collections to the active interpretation of contemporary art alongside artists, curators, and critics in cosmopolitan spaces of encounter. Drawing on Cai’s exhibition I Want to Believe, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 2008, I focus on the contrasting interpretations of Cai’s key installations, that is, the perspectives that dramatize different notions of the global. Is contemporary art the latest form of Chinese entrepreneurialism or an expression of an emerging global civil society? Or should modern Chinese art be viewed as a distinctive kind of anticipatory politics in undoing Western categories of knowledge? In an art of assemblage and juxtaposition, how is China repositioned from an object of Western knowledge to a tool of global intervention?

What Marco Polo Forgot guson (2008) warned that, with China as the global banker to indebted nations, in the long run, “New York could turn In 1995, artist Cai Guo-Qiang set adrift a Chinese junk on into Venice.” the Grand Canal, Venice (see fig. 1). The event was the 46th The two historical moments—the opening of Europe’s Venice Biennale. Marking the seven-hundredth anniversary trade with China and the irony of Chinese state capitalism of Marco Polo’s return to Venice, Cai filled a junk with Chi- saving Western capitalism—are geopolitical shifts marked by nese herbs and medicines that Marco Polo apparently forgot Cai. These events raise the following questions: Is contem- to take with him on his departure in 1291 from the port city porary art the latest form of Chinese entrepreneurialism or of Quanzhou (Cai’s hometown). an expression of an emerging global civil society? Or should Cai’s staging of this epic encounter has drawn intense con- modern Chinese art be viewed as a distinctive kind of antic- troversy. An American scholar points out that in some Ve- ipatory politics in undoing Western categories of knowledge? netian monastery, there is a record of Marco Polo bringing In an art of assemblage and juxtaposition, how is China re- back Chinese herbs. But anthropology goes beyond a literal positioned from an object of Western knowledge to a tool of truth to look for meanings in acts of cultural negotiation. At global intervention? first blush, Cai’s installation seems to be an ironical commentary for our times—that Marco Polo forgot to bring back From Structure to Juxtaposition to Europe Chinese spiritual traditions embodied in the me- Like an “armchair Marco Polo,” Eric Wolf was a twentieth- dicinal plants. At the end of the twentieth century, a Chinese century anthropologist tracing the itineraries of economic en- artist seems to ask, “What can China give the world besides terprises beyond the Western world. In the 1960s, at a time opportunities for trade?” In the fall of 2008, as much of the when anthropologists charted islands of culture, Wolf tracked world spiraled into a financial crisis, the historian Niall Fer- the spread of European capitalism around the globe, spawning a mix of conquest, colonial adventures, and commercial pro- Aihwa Ong is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the duction (Wolf 1982). Called a “systems Marxist,” Wolf ana- University of California, Berkeley (Kroeber Hall, Berkeley, California lyzed the structural integration of entire regions into a single 94720-3711, U.S.A. [[email protected]]). This paper was modern world system. The dispersal of capitalist trade and submitted 28 I 10 and accepted 13 I 11. production, he argued, ultimately incorporated non-Western

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Figure 1. Cia Guo-Qiang, Bring to Venice What Marco Polo Forgot, 1995. At the Grand Canal, Venice. For the exhibition Transculture. Installation incorporating a wooden fishing boat from Quanzhou, Chinese herbs, earthen jars, ginseng beverages, bamboo ladles, porcelain cups, ginseng (100 kg), and handcart. Photo by Yamamoto Tadasu, courtesy Cai Studio. A color version of this figure is available in the online edition of Current Anthropology. peoples at great cost to their well-being and cultures. Wolf’s and geopolitical conditions. For instance, Wolf and others did key achievement is his reorientation of the story of capitalism, not foresee the rise of Asia as a global region that raises doubts from one of Western self-narrative to a transnational story about the preeminence of North Atlantic nations and their involving a multitude of peoples, political struggles, and cul- reigning ideas. Human rights theorists who talk about the a tural contestations. The expansion of European capitalism “global civil society” do not sufficiently engage the realpolitik subsequently destroyed non-European cultures and, in the of resurgent nationalisms (Held et al. 1999). Entrenched the- process, produced “the people without history,” as Wolf iron- ories of the world, defined by a singular system of political ically called them. economy or a transnational regime of virtue, are clearly in- This Europe-centric vantage point is still influential in our adequate for engaging complex and dynamic conditions everyday thinking about the contemporary world. Scholars transforming global relations. and policy makers continue to be guided by ideas of global Today, the future recedes because it is no longer forecast transformation that view a progressive division of the modern by a sole historical horizon, an unchallenged cultural supe- world in two halves: colonial and postcolonial, backward and riority, or an overwhelming sense of moral certitude. Many capitalist, the global North and the global South. Beyond the anthropologists no longer invest in theories of a world system optic of capitalism making the modern world, a newer dis- or in the inevitability of universal transformation according course of new humanitarianism also envisions a European to the precepts of Enlightenment ideals. We are skeptical that postsovereignty ideal that will spread the growth of multilat- social phenomena can be read as stabilized or neatly repro- eral governance across the world. Both models of global order ducible structures or that social change can be thought of as based on borderless capitalism and transnational humanitar- unfolding according to some prescribed futures. Our accel- ianism fly in the face of actual world events, robust nations, erated interconnections have surpassed old geographies of

East-West divisions, and the linear temporality of universalist ing role of anthropologists in mediating and critiquing West- thinking, in its guise as hegemonic globalization, continues ern “appropriation” and appreciation of ethnographic arti- to apprehend the world in terms of structural binarism and facts as “art” from the Third and Fourth Worlds.5 My predetermined outcomes. approach is very different, focusing not on the circulation of Against such totalizing models of political domination, an- indigenous art but on the circulation of contemporary artists thropologists have turned to an ethnography of the local. They exercising novel ideas in spaces of global encounter. I see the seek to liberate non-European “others” from theories that anthropologist as not merely an expert on “native artifacts” render them fixed and subordinated in global peripheries. installed in Western collections but a cointerpreter alongside Leading anthropologists have called for presenting the local artists, curators, and critics of contemporary art, especially in terms of cultural particularities or resistances that challenge that produced by non-Western artists. metropolitan power. Some have called for “the native’s point The artist Sol Lewitt notes that conceptual art is art in of view” (Geertz 1973) or “letting the subaltern speak” (Spivak which the idea takes precedence over traditional concerns with 1988), while others celebrate the local modification or even craftsmanship. It can be defined as “the idea that becomes a rejection of foreign ideas and products.1 By privileging cultural machine that makes the art” (Lewitt 1967). There is a pro- spaces, particularities, and agencies, these approaches unwit- ductive resonance between this definition and what Foucault tingly reinscribe the binarism of a global North and South calls criticism. Critique, he says, “consists in seeing on what and view new spaces of global encounter subsumed within a type of assumptions, familiar notions, of established, unex- hegemonic world system.2 But the framing of a capitalist amined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based” global versus a cultural local is overdetermined by spatial fixity (Foucault 1994:456). Conceptual art, I argue, as idea and that does not engage complex transnational dynamics that critique, can be viewed as a distinctive kind of anticipatory condition the politics of space and truth claims. politics that engages a given situation as a question; that is, The philosopher Michel Foucault (1984) observes, “We are it is an art that simultaneously ruptures familiar modes of in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxta- reasoning while anticipating emerging problems. It is critical position, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, therefore to consider non-Europeans and Europeans encoun- of the dispersed. We are at a moment. I believe, when our tering each other as equivalent actors in reforming the global experience of the world is less that of a long life developing intellectual zeitgeist and in envisioning the world anew. through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein” (1). Practices of assemblages Bringing What Marco Polo Forgot and reassemblage, I argue, are key to our understanding of the making and unmaking of contingent spaces that disrupt old notions of spatial division and connection.3 In an earlier time, world-exploring projects such as Marco Polo’s voyages The Rise of Contemporary Chinese Art brought disparate peoples, places, and things into transborder Western readings of Chinese avant-gardism either reject con- interrelationships, thus configuring a new space of intersub- temporary Chinese art (CCA) as sham avant-gardism or cel- jective exchanges. Today, in a world of far superior com- ebrate it for its presumed cosmopolitanism. A brief account munications, there are myriad projects that variously link of the global emergence of CCA is in order. In the post-Mao diverse actors and viewpoints and that in interaction crys- period, Chinese artists had newfound freedoms to experiment tallize novel conditions of possibilities.4 with Western forms that broke with socialist or romantic I view contemporary art as a distinctive mode of space realism intended for educating the masses. By the 1980s, they rupturing and conceptual reconfiguration. Anthropologists had found their own artist language to depict not “what the have argued that the modern art world and market are global world should be like, but what it is.”6 The rise of CCA is a sites where bounded notions of observer and observed are momentous development, as heretofore, Asian conceptualists being challenged. As international museums and exhibitions included only a few individuals, such as expatriate Japanese proliferate, George Marcus and Fred Myers note the increas- artist Yoko Ono and the Korean artist Nam June Paik. Chinese conceptual artists, variously inspired by Marcel Duchamp, 1. Peter Worsley’s (1970) The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of “Cargo Andy Warhol, and Damian Hirst, had by the 1990s blossomed Cults” in Melanesia was an early study of cultural “resistance” to colo- nialism and capitalism. There is great variation among cultural resistance on the global art scene. scholarship, including works on the “moral economy of the peasant” China has a vast pool of contemporary art talent, with associated with James C. Scott. Recent anthropological approaches to “cultural globalization” focus on postcolonial resistances to new waves 5. For this reason, they claim that “anthropology and its traditional of consumer goods and ideas. See, e.g., Inda and Rosaldo (2005). subjects are increasingly involved in the production of art and the in- 2. For the paradigmatic formulation, see Marcus and Fischer (1986). stitutions on which its production depends.” See Marcus and Myers 3. For an earlier discussion of assemblage and reassemblage as trans- (1995:4). national practices, see Ong (2005). 6. “Orville Schell and Uli Sigg in Conversation.” Mahjong: Contem- 4. “Assembling the Global in Anthropology” series. Aihwa Ong, Ste- porary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection. Berkeley Art Museum, Sep- phen J. Collier, and Janet Roitman, eds. Palgrave-Macmillan, New York. tember 14, 2008.

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.230 on Tue, 20 Nov 2012 12:00:00 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 474 Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 4, August 2012 artists creating a wide spectrum of installations, performance Beijing, frequently pose guards or shut down exhibitions that art, and computer works. However, many artworks are highly satirize Mao and other political figures. But the very vulner- uneven in quality, and those exhibited abroad have been dis- ability of the most provocative art to state censorship engen- missed as “formulaic and facile” in their blatant commer- ders the commercial art boom, as state repression seems to cialism (Smee 2009). One trend is a seemingly automatic copy intensify the global commercial interest in forbidden Chinese of Warhol’s style, by inserting images of Mao in novel contexts art. (e.g., Marilyn/Mao by Yu Youhan). Western observers tend to Many foreign collectors and curators attend underground view the Warholian repetitive style in CCA as copycat tech- exhibitions and play the role of gatekeepers, whose criteria niques intended for a commodity economy shaped by the and choices shape Western perceptions of modern Chinese international gallery system.7 Though Warhol and Jeff Koons art. For instance, a New York gallery set up PaceWildenstein have been criticized on similar grounds, they are also often in Beijing to collect works by painter Zhang Xiaogang and held up as exemplars that dramatize the banalities of affluence, performance artist (“mystical madman”) Zhang Huan. Be- while Chinese artistic citations of Pop Art or global icons sides the obvious reason of their capacity to attract high prices, such as Marilyn or Mao are condemned as crass commercial Peter Boris of PaceWildenstein commented, “We are not opportunism with reduced aesthetic value. overly concerned with censorship. It creates a tension in China Swiss collector Uli Sigg, whose collection includes Marilyn/ that is absent in New York or London. It allows for heroic Mao, notes that there are about a hundred world-class figures art to be made. . . . In reality, we are witnessing the birth of among the thousands of artists who traffic in trivial com- an emerging identity” (Lankarani 2008). The productive re- mercialization, bad workmanship, and so on.8 The best works lationship between state repression and an enhanced art value have been snapped up by Western art collectors who began for foreign buyers fosters a dualistic perception that Chinese to generate a market for CCA in the West. Art Biennales experimental art can be celebrated for its cosmopolitanism further exposed CCA to international audiences, thus in- or rejected out of concerns of its propaganda or mere art creasing their demand by the global art market. American entrepreneurialism. But much of their inspiration, I argue, collectors and curators have also begun to look for fresh art comes from attempts to reframe modern mainland experi- in China, and to some extent India and other Asian countries ences and China’s relationship to the world. are considered the new sources of innovative artwork. President Jiang Zemin’s 2002 visit to Europe had also in- tensified global interest in modern Chinese art. Official China, Diaspora Artists and Cosmopolitanism which had considered contemporary art incomprehensible Thus, Western commercial and cosmopolitan interests, on the and ugly, began to sponsor it by building museums and tol- one hand, and the Chinese state’s ambivalent relationship to erating avant-gardism. The rapid conquest of global art mar- experimental art, on the other, have led to a bifurcated re- kets by CCA suggested the possibility that contemporary Chi- ception of CCA in the United States. Innovative elements in nese artists can help raise China’s global image as a cultural paintings and displays, for instance, are frequently read as force. At the same time, however, the Chinese authorities have avant-garde impulses in an unambiguous support of cos- retained the practice of deciding which artworks are banned, mopolitan freedom. A description of the Gwangju Art Bien- that is, forbidden to be shown in public and yet not inac- nale 2008 connects the florescence of Asian art to “global cessible to foreign buyers. Here, the depictions of Mao in formations of civil society, where relationship between state compromising positions, such as swimming in a sea of blood & civil society hovers in a state of animation & contestation, 9 or kneeling in remorse for wrongs committed; Mao as Mickey e.g. civil society as a platform of the global multitude.”10 Mouse; or Mao as dolls with naked female breasts have been This view of the rise of a global platform for civil action banned from public showings. The Public Security Office, as is inspired by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) in well as the developers that control the 798 Art District in their book Empire. Invoking Immanuel Kant’s notion of cosmopolitics, Hardt and Negri maintain that in a world dom- 7. The practice of embedding foreign or borrowed elements in artistic inated by capitalism’s empire, denationalized multitudes gath- works has a long history in East-West trade. Think of the exports from ering in global sites of cities, exhibitions, and cultural fairs China in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, when Chinese ceramic motifs and colorings were designed for the European markets; such Chi- create a space of “communication and collaboration in a com- noiserie elements and blue-white schemes became standard English and mon political project” (Hardt and Negri 2000:218). The mul- Dutch china ornamentations. titude in its desire for liberation is united only by its hostility 8. “Orville Schell and Uli Sigg in Conversation,” Mahjong: Contem- to the system of national borders and its tenacious desire for porary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection, Berkeley Art Museum, Sep- tember 14, 2008. cosmopolitan freedom (Hardt and Negri 2000). This global 9. In Ash Red, a 2006 exhibition that was shut down, the artist siblings versus national framework underpins Western investments in Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang displayed paintings of Mao swimming in a sea of blood. More recently, their sculptures of a kneeling Mao with a 10. “Formations of Global Society and Domains of Public Culture.” removable head and of many Mao figures aiming their rifles at Jesus Report for the Seventh Gwangju Biennale, Beijing, October 28–November Christ (echoes of a Goya painting) have also been forced underground. 1, 2008.

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.230 on Tue, 20 Nov 2012 12:00:00 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Ong “What Marco Polo Forgot”: Contemporary Chinese Art Reconfigures the Global 475 experimental art as the medium with potential for spreading Instead of viewing non-European artists as cosmopolitans communicability and commensurability in universal values. or propagandists, we can regard them as catalysts of shifting It shapes a positive view of CCA as a vehicle that propagates geopolitical perceptions. Adorno’s analytics of the political ideals of world citizenship. are recast by Espen Hammer as an “anticipatory politics” that At the same time, leading New York art critics have been responds to social configuration and are reached in a con- highly critical of the rapturous embrace of modern Chinese dition of social uncertainty and exception (Hammer 2005: art and its display in storied museums such as the Guggen- 120). As a form of micropolitics or immanent critique, Martin heim. They view CCA as sham avant-gardism developed in Jay (2006) remarks, anticipatory politics “neither papers over response to global market interest. The critics cite shoddy contradictions nor forces” and does not even point to their methods, art entrepreneurialism, and pretend or illusory positive or facile resolutions. It is an ethical practice that avant-garde messages (Schjeldahl 2008). Accusations of mod- “gains leverage by defying the reduction of experience to the ern Chinese artists as nothing more than veiled propagandists concepts that define it” (Jay 2006). I view conceptual art as of the Chinese state claim that the “Mao craze” was abetted a distinctive form of anticipatory politics that confronts ex- by European fascination with fascist art. Jed Perl, a New York isting social arrangements through border-rupturing experi- art critic, puts it this way: “There is a world of difference mentations. By assembling and juxtapositioning disparate el- between an icon freely chosen and an icon imposed from ements (West-East, past and present, culture and technology, above, and the difference has more than a little to do with etc.) in global spaces of encounter, modern Chinese art is the difference between a liberal society and an authoritarian anticipatory of a new global, one that embraces inevitable society. Warhol’s way of blurring this distinction leads straight heterogeneity, subversion, and uncertainty. I next track an to the political pornography that characterizes so much of aesthetic politics in Cai Guo-Qiang’s installations at the Gug- the new Chinese art” (Perl 2008). Perl’s judgment echoes the genheim Museum, against his critics who deploy notions of kind of reflexive condemnation in the business world whereby Chinese threat and the absence of advocacy for a cosmopol- foreign managers wish to remake Chinese workers as neolib- itan civil society in Chinese art. eral subjects but these same workers and China are then criticized as prime examples of neoliberal opportunism run wild Cai’s Spectacles in a Space of (Ong 2006). Global Encounter Such criticisms are haunted by the apparent passing of In spring 2008, Cai Guo-Qiang, an e´migre´ artist living in avant-gardism to Asian artists and the worry that the explosive Brooklyn, had a major exhibition in New York City. Called growth of Asian art markets threatens contemporary Western I Want to Believe, the show is the first by a China-born artist art. Given that the innovative energy in avant-gardism now at the Guggenheim, and it delivered a mix of spectacular arises in the East, will American critics be able to retain their paintings and installations redolent of transgression and position as preeminent arbiters in the world of modern art? magic. A curator notes the “unique aesthetic iconography” Furthermore, the indirect style and allegorical tendencies of that draws freely on Chinese medicine, maritime history, Tao- Chinese modern art are unsettling established aesthetic ist cosmology, fireworks, and Maoist revolutionary tactics norms, thus undermining the authority of Western art ex- (Krens 2008:11). There is no time to go into the many experts. hibits, including Cai’s famous paintings by gunpowder and In short, the overseas displays of Chinese conceptual art spectacles by fireworks. Cai has been viewed as an alchemist, have sparked events that arouse both hopes of cosmopolitan spinning gold out of dirt and dust (Chan 2008). He also commensurability and suspicions of sham art as propaganda. converts the American view of China as a cultural desert to Such contradictory receptions, I argue, are framed by Western an impassioned debate about the nature of Chinese experi- obsessions and fears of East Asia as an object of insurmount- mental art. Is Cai a master of Chinese avant-garde oppor- able difference. On the one hand, there is the insistence on tunism or an authentic champion of artistic freedom? the international relevance of neo-Enlightenment projects That April, I walked into a crowded audience at the ex- now taken up by “the people without history” or from the hibition I Want to Believe. People were craning their necks to heretofore periphery; on the other hand, there is the expec- look at a chain of American automobiles tumbling from the tation that the Chinese experimental artist must take on the ceiling. Electric light rods protruding from the cars emitted tormented legacy of modern European history. flashing lights, thus heightening the image of a sequence of Indeed, Chinese experimental artists use their works to car explosions. This vertical installation was called Inoppor- interpret historical events—Marco Polo’s return to Europe, tune: Stage One, indicating the imageries related to acts of the end of the Cold War, 9/11, and the rise of China—to terrorism and the violent uses of American technology (see index shifts in global and national orders. The question there- fig. 3).11 fore becomes one of how conceptual Asian art in global contexts can change Western perceptions of China and a Chinese 11. The Cai Archives provided images of installations from earlier role in shaping the global. What are modern Chinese artists exhibitions, but they are the same as the exhibits I observed at the bringing to the West that Marco Polo did not (see fig. 2)? Guggenheim Museum in 2008.

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Figure 2. Cai Guo-Qiang, Bring to Venice What Marco Polo Forgot, 1995. Cai helping to load wooden fishing boat from Quanzhou, Chinese herbs, ginseng (100 kg). Boat: 700 # 950 # 180 cm. Commissioned by the 46th Venice Biennale. Museo Navale di Venezia (fishing boat), private collections (other components). Photo by Yamamoto Tadasu, courtesy Cai Studio. Figures 1 and 2 are of the actual Cai installations that took place at the Transculture exhibition, 46th Venice Biennale, 1995. A color version of this figure is available in the online edition of Current Anthropology.

In another room, there was a wooden Chinese boat, its Whereas American technology has been put to violent uses surface studded with approximately 3,000 arrows, that was by enemies (and Americans?) against the source country (i.e., also suspended from the ceiling. Attached to the bow was an in a kind of technological blowback), in Chinese hands, West- electric fan, blowing a red Chinese flag (see fig. 4). The mu- ern weapons are combined with Chinese tactics to defend seum copy notes that this work alludes to a legendary story Chinese lives. A historical continuity of guerilla tactics is in- involving a Chinese general (Zhuge Liang, 1812–1834) who voked in the display of an ancient Chinese boat sailing home provided a lesson on the importance of resourcefulness and after using their weapons to disarm opponents, with the na- strategy. In order to produce tens of thousands of arrows for tional flag fluttering in the wind (also a condition of possibility an impending battle, Zhuge had his men fill 20 boats with enabled by Western technology). In other words, technology straw figures and set out just before dawn. War drums at- is meaningful only in the context of its strategic uses in an- tracted the enemies, who fired arrows into the straw dummies, ticipation of specific political outcomes. thus effectively delivering Zhuge with the weapons. The cu- Another display featuring indigenous knowledge and for- ratorial statement notes Cai’s analysis of China’s emergence eign technology depicts the ark used by Genghis Khan in his in the late 1990s through a tactical borrowing of Western invasion of Eurasia. The ark is composed of 108 inflated technologies (Krens and Munroe 2008:204–205). sheepskins and three Toyota engines that are kept running to Whereas the work symbolizes technological borrowing, my keep the raft aloft (see fig. 5). Museum curators interpret the own reading finds a deeper message about mobile weapons juxtapositioning of Khan’s skills as a warrior and the tale of and different cultural deployment. Cai seems to set up a con- “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” as a caution to Western audiences trasting parallelism between the installation of exploding about their fears of Asian dominance. Newsmagazine clip- American cars and this display of a boat bearing stolen arrows. pings that line the gallery wall “document the mutual de-

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.230 on Tue, 20 Nov 2012 12:00:00 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Figure 3. Cai Guo-Qiang, Inopportune: Stage One, 2004. Nine cars and sequenced multichannel light tubes. Dimensions variable. Seattle Art Museum, gift of Robert M. Arnold, in honor of the seventy-ﬁfth anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum, 2006. ᭧ Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York. Photo by David Heald. A color version of this ﬁgure is available in the online edition of Current Anthropology.

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Figure 4. Cai Guo-Qiang, Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows, 1998. Wooden boat, canvas sail, arrows, metal, rope, Chinese flag, and electric fan. Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in honor of Glenn D. Lowry. Photo by Hiro Ihara, courtesy Cai Studio. A color version of this figure is available in the online edition of Current Anthropology. pendence—characterized by attraction and repulsion—be- artists. Nevertheless, some American art critics have charac- tween East and West in the era of globalization” (Krens and terized Cai as a clever showman and sham artist who is ov- Munroe 2008:193–197). erpromoted by greedy corporations. They note his past as a Again, the above reading seems to miss a more subtle and stage manager, identify technical flaws in his work, and crit- hopeful message. Asia’s historical resourcefulness in using icize the use of factory products, such as stuffed animals, in technologies from different sources is exemplified by Kahn’s his installations (certainly Warhol and Koons both used mass- success in enlarging his dominion. Today, Cai’s magic dragon production techniques and faced similar objections). The is an allegory of how our world is kept afloat by cross-cultural Guggenheim is vilified for using this avant-gardist opportunist technologies that animate ancient skills. The Toyota engines to “turn the museum into a space of corporate spectacle” allude to Asian companies making use of American technol- (Davis 2008). Because Cai refuses to speak on behalf of the ogy to provide affordable transportation for the world’s pop- Chinese government or use the language of civil society and ulation. Such novel combinations of disparate skills and art- fulness should be viewed not as dangerous but as human rights, he is viewed as lacking in ideology and inter- contemporary forms of cultural creativity that draw on dis- ested only in making a lot of money. parate skills from many lands to form, in often surprising Cai’s most explicitly political work at this exhibition was ways, bridges across political divides of time and space. Rent Collection Courtyard, a pre-Liberation scene composed The broad reception of Cai’s works has been mixed. Cai of life-size peasants bringing rent to a landlord. As a repro- is recognized as head and shoulders above many China-based duction of an iconic socialist critique of feudal oppression

Figure 5. Cai Guo-Qiang, Cry Dragon/Cry Wolf: The Ark of Genghis Khan, 1996. One hundred eight sheepskin bags, wooden branches, paddles, rope, three Toyota engines, and photocopies of various magazine covers and article clippings. Photo by Hiro Ihara, courtesy Cai Studio. A color version of this ﬁgure is available in the online edition of Current Anthropology. that originated in the Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts in 1965, propaganda showpiece. Commenting on this example of Cai’s display is controversial on many fronts (see ﬁg. 6). socialist-realist aesthetics, Cai was reported as saying, “I do In China, the original work has been used as a model for not know whether it is the artists of the Cultural Revolution political and educational purposes that give voice to peasants or us who hold the strongest attachment to art, but the people and workers speaking out against class exploitation. In 1999, of that time believed in a new society and an ideal for man- the director of the Venice Biennale asked Cai to reproduce a kind” (Perl 2008). Invoking this quote, Perl, the New York small-scale version of Rent Collection Court, perhaps as an art critic, condemns Cai for his “Stalinist double-talk,” in ironic appropriation of what Westerns viewed as a Maoist suggesting that only “proletarian art, the people’s art, is real

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Figure 6. Cai Guo-Qiang, Rent Collection Courtyard, 1999. Realized at Deposito Polveri, Arsenale, Venice. One hundred eight life- sized sculptures created on site by Long Xu Li and nine guest artisan sculptors, 60 tons of clay, wire, and wood armature. Commissioned by the 48th Venice Biennale. Photo by Elio Montanari, courtesy Cai Studio. A color version of this ﬁgure is available in the online edition of Current Anthropology. art” and thereby seducing “the mass audience that visits to- original artists who championed the suffering masses need day’s tonier museums. . . . These artists have pulled off a feat not be read as an automatic support for the totalitarian regime unprecedented in modern history: they have ﬁgured out a that followed. First, the relocation of the Courtyard scene in way to be communist fellow travelers and capitalist fellow a startlingly different way challenges the claim about a restag- travelers at the same time” (Perl 2008). Here is an instance ing of state propaganda. Especially for Chinese audiences, of an impassioned reception that sees the world in black-and- Cai’s model of this icon of peasant suffering and cry for social white terms. The liberal West has free subjects; totalitarian justice in prerevolutionary China can engender mixed emo- China has robotic propagandist artists. Global spaces are now tions that rupture links to past culture and past politics. On dangerously connected by copycat Chinese artists and greedy the one hand, there is profound revulsion at the cruelties American collectors and curators who abet and showcase associated with Chinese feudalism and relief that many of its them in Western centers of prestige. Perl’s rancor is framed forms have been eliminated.12 On the other hand, the re- by an orientalist perspective incapable of viewing East Asian creation of an earlier socialist agitprop in contemporary times subjects as having independent thought, creativity, and po- outside China can be a jarring reminder of the political mis- litical agency. The overseas activities of Chinese artists are takes and catastrophes that betrayed the dreams of the Chinese rejected as propaganda efforts to aestheticize the catastrophe masses. There is deep embarrassment (perhaps not limited to of the Maoist revolution and hoodwink free people every- ethnic Chinese audiences) in being forced to contemplate a where with the aesthetic virtues of totalitarian art. revolutionary piece that embodies an unyielding tendency While a conceptual work need not coincide with the in- toward the past and the mindless adherence to the collective tention of the artist, good experimental art unfurls a chain will. of ideas that takes us to different conclusions. Cai’s comments about the artists who built the original Courtyard project 12. For mainland criticisms of Chinese feudal culture, see, e.g., Tu recognize their authentic passions, but such empathy for the Wei-Ming (1991).

Furthermore, a close inspection of the display discloses that in motion, one that repeats the same mistake over and over the figures have been constructed of clay and wire, a technique again (Davis 2008). So a project that is widely interpreted as that shows them going through various stages of crumbling. individuals rushing to freedom can also be read as an oblique Is the disintegration of both the peasant and rent-collecting criticism of the herd instinct of the collective that drives the figures a subtle performance of the disintegration of the multitude to reproduce political disasters again and again. socialist-realist dreams over the passage of time? By assem- Can it be that Head On uses Eastern Europe as the stand-in bling a propaganda icon in a novel context, while exposing for China and its disastrous blunders in recent history? its material form to the natural conditions of deterioration, Although foreign audiences frequently miss the complex Cai’s project subtly erodes Maoist thinking and juxtaposes links to traumatic events and revisionist remembering of re- feudal violence with the larger revolutionary violence that cent Chinese history, artists such as Cai trouble Western per- haunts this work. In Cai’s hands, Rent Collection Courtyard ceptions of and demands on Chinese art to perform according is stripped of its original power, and in its undisguised banality to their political assumptions. By challenging established in the Guggenheim, the scenario becomes a message that the thinking about time and space, Cai enacts a form of aesthetic revolutionary past and its utopian dreams should be allowed politics in global sites that anticipates emergent experiences to fade away. This oblique message about time and hindsight of the global. destroying faith in revolutionary politics and state authori- American curators who defend Cai want to promote Asian tarianism is echoed, again in a paradoxical way, in another artists as e´migre´ artists whose art expresses cross-border free- Cai installation. doms and contributes to Western ideals of cosmopolitanism. In Head On, 99 wolves suspended in a stream slam into a However, leading Chinese artists refuse to give comfort to glass wall (see fig. 7). Viewers tend to see this work as a such assumptions about commensurable cosmopolitanism. celebration of individual freedom that led to the fall of the Arthur Lubow, a New York Times journalist, notes that Cai Berlin Wall. But in a recent comment, Cai notes that the work is a global citizen who both discomforts his country and is can be read not as 99 individual wolves but as a single entity also “very patriotic” (Lubow 2008). And yet, Chinese artists

Figure 7. Cai Guo-Qiang, Head On, 2006. Ninety-nine life-sized replicas of wolves and a glass wall. Wolves: gauze, resin, and painted hide. Dimensions variable. Deutsche Bank Collection, commissioned by Deutsche Bank AG. Photo by Hiro Ihara, courtesy Cai Studio. Figures 3–7 are of Cai’s earlier works similar to the installations in the I Want to Believe exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008. Although my discussion is focused on the Guggenheim exhibits, Cai Studio furnished the images of earlier installations. A color version of this ﬁgure is available in the online edition of Current Anthropology.

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.230 on Tue, 20 Nov 2012 12:00:00 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 482 Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 4, August 2012 stir unease because of their attachment to China as the moth- but who also knows how to play the Chinese card very well erland. Whereas in conventional anthropology of art, the fo- when necessary. cus is on the “authenticity” of “primitive” objects, here we The question is, Are these artists also troubling authori- have a new global situation where the problem is focused on tarian politics at home? What mode of politics is at stake the “authenticity” of the modern artist, a criterion that does here? Indeed, the adjacency of world-renown Chinese artists not go with being an “authentic” Chinese subject as well.13 to the Chinese state is extremely troubling to Western observers who seek in CCA explicit critiques of the Chinese Authentic Artist, Inauthentic Chinese? party-state. American obsessions about the threat of China’s capitalism to Western avant-gardism and suspicion of Chinese Such conceptual compartmentalization compels artists to uses of art as propaganda can be traced to the uses of modern swerve between being framed as genuine avant-garde artists art by state socialism and for the glorification of the Third (cosmopolitan) and being framed as authentic Chinese (Chi- Reich. For art critics, there has been no problem with com- nese patriots)—but not both at the same time. Assumptions missioning ethnic Chinese artists such as Maya Lin to create about an artist’s distance or closeness to China as motherland the Vietnam Veterans Memorial or I. M. Pei to redesign part enact a moral audit of his or her art. The new twinning of of the Louvre Museum for the glorification of France. But Chinese identity and global capitalist power also contributes contemporary Chinese artists who are nationals of China are to such binary oppositions. The question of what is “Chinese” always already judged as compromised when they work on in CCA is thus viewed as a source of geopolitical apprehen- national projects for China. The assumptions that one cannot sions as well as global market value. be both an avant-garde artist and a patriotic Chinese, or be In 2005, an Italian collector who opened a gallery in Beijing loved by Western art critics and love your Chinese homeland noted that “you cannot tell from their work that they are at the same time, block more nuanced interpretations of mod- Chinese. They express strong ideas with a lot of freshness” ern artistic experiments. (Lankarani 2008). Here is the familiar premise about the in- For American critics, the 2008 Beijing Olympics was a commensurability of being a Chinese and an avant-gardist. global show put on by a fascist state, and many refused to Thus, Chinese artists have had to manage perceptions that give it legitimacy by watching it. Thus, when Cai, Zhang they are interested only in commercial benefits and/or prop- Yimou, and Ai Weiwei variously participated in staging the agandist influence overseas. In Western contexts, many artists Beijing Olympics, they were judged as selling out. Critics claim claim that their “Chineseness” is incidental to their art, even that by taking a position of adjacency to the state, they lend when global markets want art from China. At the same time, their talents to the glorification of China itself (Lubow 2008). the very “Chineseness” in CCA has been an irreducible part But one can also read the involvement of leading artists as a of its cultural appeal to Asian collectors who may otherwise way to convert a nationalistic show into a reimagination of have been indifferent to experimental art. This divergent val- the global. Zhang Yimou, the film director in charge of the uation of Chineseness—as having market value in Western Olympics cultural performances, said, “The Olympic circle is and Asian markets but questionable political valence in West- round. The National Stadium is circular. There is Cai’s circle ern art circles—has conditioned the more commercially in the sky. The circle is very important in Chinese thinking— driven artists to be highly sensitive about their Chinese iden- the sky is round, the earth is square. Round symbolizes lim- tity. Given the politics of reception that require modern Asian itlessness, also fullness and completeness” (Lubow 2008). In art to be either lucrative or avant-gardist, but not both at the the opening ceremonies, Cai orchestrated the fireworks spiral same time (as compared to Hirst’s works), Chinese artists that suggested a dragon unfurling out of the “Bird’s Nest,” have become agile in dodging “Chineseness” as a damning that is, a pyrotechnical display of China’s spectacular but category. Cai was recently interviewed in New York about peaceful rise in consonant with the Olympic theme of “One how he sees himself as a border-crossing artist. Cai replied World, One Dream.”15 Such a legend issued by another coun- that he checks all the boxes for “international,” “Chinese,” try would be considered benign or a gesture to the Olympic “Asian,” and “contemporary,” but the most meaningful cat- global spirit, but these Chinese displays have been received egory is as “a New York artist . . . [where] you can be a normal as contamination by the state and not as a cultural celebration 14 person.” Here is an instance of the entrepreneurial artist that anticipates a globality of spirit transcending the Chinese who wants to get passports and be welcomed in global cities nation. Chinese art is shaping global encounters that do not nec- 13. The debate on the political “authenticity” of the artist is an important problem that is underdeveloped in conventional anthropology essarily produce the kind of commensurable politics Western of art, which tends to dwell on “authentic” versus “fake” art objects. See, progressives associate with their ideal of a global civil society. e.g., Morphy and Perkins (2006). 14. See Wall Street Journal–sponsored event, “Art without Borders,” 15. The slogan “One World, One Dream” is conspicuously borne on Summer Festival at the Lincoln Center, July 1, 2009. http://online.wsj a giant banner attached to a major viewing site of the Great Wall. Here .com/video/art-without-borders/642509E4-957E-4A95-BC0C is a state promise that China’s new prominence seeks to promote global -CD5BEC7D38D3.html (accessed July 3, 2009). solidarity rather than division.

As anticipatory politics, experimental art tends to expose dif- in addressing our global wounds and existentialist crisis, our ferences and conflicts, to generate conditions of possibility loss of old certainties in politics and beliefs, unleashes a spiral for new forces that do not fall neatly into a pregiven insti- of new ideas. Artists such as Cai take spatial and mystical tutional form. For instance, Ai had collaborated in the design leaps that do not follow logically from sociological causes and of the Bird’s Nest, but he disputed the image of the new connections. The mobile art of anticipatory politics, through stadium as a container of Chinese culture or launching pad its novel combinations and disjunctures, can heal global for China’s political glory. Ai says that the design of the sta- wounds while anticipating new global possibilities. Chinese dium represents emptiness and that the conception “was free artists subvert old categories without being frozen into a po- of any obstructions of traditional notions” (Zhang 2008). His litical stance of being for or against China. Experimental Chi- refusal of Chinese elements is an interesting contrast to Cai’s nese art problematizes established notions of global civil so- redeployment of the same in his art. But Ai’s iconoclastic ciety and avant-garde politics while proposing new ways of move is to break from contemporary Chinese politics (“We thinking that do not settle for predetermined resolutions or must bid farewell to autocracy”; Ai 2008), a struggle depicted outcomes. Because anticipatory political art operates in the in the elliptical web of steel columns that seems to strain to vector space that takes multiple sites as points of reference, contain intense activity within. Jacques Herzog, of the Swiss it makes conflicts more visible and engages in a “continuous Herzog and de Meuron firm that built the structure, notes criticism” (Foucault 1994:457) of institutionalized relation- that “the building is made to be open. It is a work of public ships. It crystallizes conditions for reenvisioning the world as sculpture” (Ouroussoff 2008:A1, A14). Although the Chinese heterogeneous and always in motion. government built a fence around it, the Bird’s Nest anticipates In closing, I call for an anthropological engagement with a new politics of public space (in sharp contrast to the massive art criticism that both interprets the art objects individually surveillance of Tiananmen Square). Ai feels that the state has and also critically engages with interpretations of non- (temporarily) misappropriated his symbolism of the national European refigurations of the global. As rooted cosmopoli- stadium (he refused to attend the Olympics). Clearly, the tans, mobile artists cannot be reduced to stereotypical figures designers view the Bird’s Nest as a free-flowing structure (red- of a global civil society or of a particular culture or state. olent of Taoism?) that transcends public-private divides and Poised at the junction of nations, their novel reassemblages reaches between national barriers for a new global openness. of disparate cultural elements are involved in a continuous The vector of ideas unleashed by Cai’s and Ai’s works dis- interrogation of received categories that have long frozen our rupts Western binarism and fears of Asia to suggest a new picture of the world. Conceptual artists are exemplary figures configuration of global possibilities. Their projects are com- of what cosmopolitan anthropologists can and should be in mentaries on historical events that benchmark steps in the contemporary times. As anticipatory political actors in the arrival of a new global era. Asia as an object of Western world at large, Chinese artists perform their role as “authen- reflection is being taken up as an object of aesthetic revision tically modern” global subjects. At stake are new ideas that and intervention in our confrontation with global realities. rethink the global. China’s leading public intellectual, Wang Hui, has observed that “with Cai, ‘China’ or ‘Asia’ is no longer an object of ‘Western’ eyes. . . . Cai does not objectify his own experience Acknowledgments and tradition, but rather methodolizes them in order to ob- An earlier version of the article was presented as the Fifth Eric serve the world in which we exist. Precisely in striving to turn Wolf Lecture (2009) at the University of Vienna. I thank Andre ‘China’ and ‘Asia’ into a method,” Cai’s style as an aesthetic Gingrich, Institute for Social Anthropology at the Austrian catalyst draws on a literary tradition of using civilization (wen) Academy of Sciences, for inviting me to speak in Vienna, the to oppose savagery (Wang 2008:47–48). For this reason, per- center of artistic experiments at the turn of the twentieth cen- haps, Cai can be compared to a traditional Chinese healer, a tury. conjurer of possible futures out of the unpromising detritus of materiality, culture, and history.

Conclusion: The Artist Problematizes the Global Comments

Marco Polo opened a route to China, but we are still grappling Lily Chumley with the concepts of the world as an interconnected mutuality. Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York Contemporary Chinese artists actively juxtapose Chinese and University, 239 Greene Street, New York, New York 10003, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 27 II 12 Western idioms in works that rupture and animate the global as a problem-space of ideas. CCA intervenes in the power As Aihwa Ong suggests in her paper, international interest in relations of global representations. Chinese contemporary art is framed by curiosity about As a distinctive form of anticipatory politics, Chinese art, China’s reform era, in particular curiosity about cultural

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.230 on Tue, 20 Nov 2012 12:00:00 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 484 Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 4, August 2012 transformations resulting from structural transition. English- famous artists—integrating Xu Bing’s conceptual calligraphy language critical writing on Chinese art tends to refer to and the ironic Mao references of Political Pop. However, the “emerging,” “developing,” and even “burgeoning” sensibili- contrast between this student’s work and the famous art it ties, deploying the same spatial and temporal rhetorics that recalled is telling. Her toilet paper calligraphy was heavily journalists use to describe China’s “rise.” dependent on local references to specific texts and textual The politics of desire that surround the transnational cir- practices. To the teacher, those familiar lines of poetry seemed culations of images of resistance are an object of ironic re- cliche´d, but for an international audience, they would seem flection among artists in China. Here is a joke: why is it that arcane and require rather more translation and interpretation even now, 35 years after his death, so much “contemporary” than many venues are willing to offer young artists. In con- art (especially in the ’90s genre called “Political Pop,” which trast, far from subverting “old categories” or problematizing the collector Uli Sigg helped bring to international promi- “established notions,” Xu Bing’s famous text pieces avoid pre- nence around the turn of the century) still depicts the face senting Western viewers with the limits of their own inter- of Chairman Mao? Answer: because he is the only Chinese pretive capacities. What at first looks like inscrutable Chinese political figure that Western buyers can recognize. calligraphy turns out to be English after all, or else (in another Western buyers of Chinese contemporary art have been piece) illegible nonsense, which there is no need to read. consistently fascinated by work that seems to express political Cai Guo-Qiang presents an interesting case in this context. opposition. But it is not always clear what these collectors Cai has persistently insisted on using textual explication to want Chinese artists to oppose or, rather, which object of communicate with foreign audiences. Most non-Chinese vis- resistance they want to see in the images they purchase: the itors to the Guggenheim will be forced to read museum copy communist past? the contemporary party-state? the excesses in order to even begin to interpret the Rent Collection Court- of unregulated capitalism? yard or Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows. It is not just a ref- The confusion of oppositions in which post–Cold War West- erence but also a history lesson. In that sense, it is certainly ern art collectors find themselves is paralleled in the often- a “tool of global intervention.” But if this is an “anticipatory conflicting political orientations and economic commitments politics,” what kind of politics is it? Cai’s reproduction of of many artists and intellectuals in China. This political am- Rent Collection Courtyard as a crumbling monument is evoc- bivalence is aptly described in a spoken-word piece by the ative, even haunting. But is it a challenge to the dominant avant-garde musician Yan Jun: Fandui, fandui women ziji, fan- narratives of contemporary political economy, according to dui yiqie, fandui women bu keneng fandui de yiqie (Oppose, which we find ourselves in a capitalism that appears, for better oppose ourselves, oppose everything, oppose everything we or worse, as the “end of history”? cannot oppose). In this context, ostensibly political signifiers such as Red Guards in green uniforms tend to operate ambig- uously, both at home and in the international art market. In- serting such images into a Chelsea gallery, rather than “undoing Western categories of knowledge,” may actually confirm them. Certainly, many Chinese artists who came to prominence Sara L. Friedman in the 1990s (often as e´migre´s to the West) had personal and Departments of Anthropology and Gender Studies, Indiana Uni- political reasons for exploring the socialist iconography of the versity, 701 East Kirkwood Avenue, Bloomington, Indiana 47405, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 17 II 12 Cultural Revolution. However, they also understood the in- scrutability of most of that iconography outside of China. In A quick glance at the daily news reveals considerable anxiety a time when the market for Chinese contemporary art was about China’s status as a global power and growing Euro- almost entirely foreign, the limitations of Western audiences American dependence on a country that has married au- set limits to their explorations, in many respects more con- thoritarian governance to unbridled capitalism. If the twenty- fining than those set by censorship (given that many of these first century will be a Chinese century, what will this future artists were living in the West and that the Chinese party- bring, and how will it differ from the previous “American” state apparatus has historically been relatively less concerned century? Aihwa Ong insightfully interrogates this possibility with restricting niche genres). The work of becoming cos- by asking how contemporary Chinese art challenges Western mopolitan has never been equally distributed. categories of space, knowledge, and power by staging new In a class in the Central Academy of Fine Arts that I ob- global configurations and imaginaries. As in her previous served as part of fieldwork in 2008, a young woman made a work (e.g., Ong 1999, 2005, 2006), Ong integrates novel ar- series of conceptual art pieces about Mao’s poetry. In one ticulations of people, places, ideas, and forces to expose di- piece she wrote lines from his famous poems on toilet paper, verse formulations of the global with sensitive analytic flair. in water. The teacher told her: “This is not your life. Why Here, she examines both contemporary artworks and the pres- make work about the past?” He insinuated that she was trying ence of Chinese artists in a marketplace formerly dominated to make something that would sell by repeating themes from by Euro-Americans. These artists, Ong argues, radically un-

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.230 on Tue, 20 Nov 2012 12:00:00 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Ong “What Marco Polo Forgot”: Contemporary Chinese Art Reconfigures the Global 485 settle Western arbiters of artistic excellence by deploying a be in contemporary times.” This suggestive equation under- form of “anticipatory politics” that shifts geopolitical orien- scores the simultaneously rooted and mobile personas of Chi- tations and foreshadows new global possibilities. nese artists whose artistic vision and reception remain deeply Ong rightly takes to task Western art critics whose partic- inflected by national politics. Ai Weiwei’s fate in the aftermath ular brand of cosmopolitanism requires pigeonholing Chinese of the Beijing Olympics provides a cautionary tale for the contemporary artists as either nationalist propagandists or future of cosmopolitan art and anthropology alike. Jailed for advocates of global civil society and human rights. Although three months in spring 2011 (ostensibly for financial irreg- the works of Cai Guo-Qiang and Ai Weiwei certainly offer ularities), Ai now faces restrictions on his movement within possibilities for transcending those binaries and Western-cen- China and internationally. His outspoken critiques of the Bei- tric global orientations, the artists persistently encounter their jing Olympics and iconoclastic artistic performances have own Chineseness as a problem around which they dance with made him more rooted than ever before, and although he care and some ambivalence. Yet, their ability to subvert na- has been commissioned to design a pavilion for the 2012 tional identifications may be more constrained than Ong sug- London Olympics, he is unlikely to see his work in person. gests. Cai, for example, literally embodies the burden of mod- Whether the new global possibilities enacted through con- ern Chinese nation building (his name, Guo-Qiang, translates temporary Chinese art and its transnational encounters trans- as “nation strengthening”). Hence, in Cai’s desire to neutralize form politics on the ground is clearly an open question. As his Chinese origins, to be known as a “New York artist,” we anthropologists, how can we cultivate a sensitive eye for the sense a struggle to escape his very personal inscription in the increasingly heterogeneous visions of the global emerging in nation. diverse contexts while also remaining attuned to the possi- At stake here is the nature of politics in “anticipatory pol- bilities and consequences of living those visions? Ong’s article itics.” Contemporary art is a world of the elite, and the new provokes us to ask how our futures as cosmopolitan anthro- global configurations that Ong astutely finds in these works pologists will be shaped by our responses to this challenge. speak to elite sensibilities more than to the aspirations of the masses. Another approach to anticipatory politics addresses how the urban poor strategize in relation to unexpected possibilities that may create new opportunities for advancement or simply reconfigure the contours of global marginality Laurel Kendall (Simone 2010). This attention to the everyday practices and Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, experiences of politics offers additional insights into how dif- Central Park West at 79th Street, New York, New York 10024, ferent visions of the global take shape along a continuum of U.S.A. ([email protected]). 22 II 12 elite and popular interests. Here I briefly sketch two lines of inquiry inspired by Ong’s rich analysis. Contemporary art’s potential for political cri- Gunpowder Artfully Deployed tique emerges partly through its sheer materiality: defined by Witnessing the explosive presence of contemporary Chinese presence, scale, and detail, these works thrust themselves into artists on the international scene—sometimes literally explo- the viewer’s sight lines and demand engagement. The medium sive, deploying gun powder—Aihwa Ong describes this work matters. Ong’s perceptive reading of Cai’s reassemblage of the as symptomatic of the destabilization of “old geographies of high socialist work Rent Collection Courtyard demonstrates East-West divisions,” revealing the “complex transnational dy- how his choice of clay and wire, media that slowly crumble namics that condition the politics of space and truth claims.” over time, critically redefines the revolutionary attack on feu- Ong takes Cai Guo-Qiang’s 2008 Guggenheim Museum ret- dal oppression as a totalitarian project destined for the dustbin rospective, I Want to Believe, as her primary focus, a mingling of history. This critique, Ong argues, creates a conceptual of traditional motifs and modern technology that makes play- space for envisioning a Chinese politics that does not reject ful and sometimes poignant allusions to Chinese history, both the animating passions of the revolutionary past but recasts recent and distant. An artful shape shifter, Cai’s work resists them through the sobering reflections of a contemporary gaze. easy characterization as “Chinese” or “Western,” “propa- Yet, if the reassemblage of this work in the Western-inflected ganda” or “critique”; it is, in Ong’s terms, a “border-ruptur- space of the Vienna Biennale unsettles existing cosmopolitan ing” experimentation. I applaud Ong’s project and with it the frameworks, it does so by demanding commensurability pri- particular challenges that any consideration of contemporary marily from an exclusive group of contemporary art critics East Asia poses to tidy dichotomizations of the West and the and aficionados. rest. While Ong is primarily concerned with the rise of Asia What does the staging of contemporary art mean for pol- as a contemporary global phenomenon, the region has always itics on the ground as experienced by the artists themselves? defied easy disciplinary generalization—peoples with history Ong concludes by identifying conceptual artists as “exemplar in spades and sometimes their own imperial projects. Ong’s figures of what cosmopolitan anthropologists can and should critique here puts indigestion to constructive use. But while

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I applaud her “call for an anthropological engagement with art criticism that . . . critically engages with interpretations Ralph Litzinger Department of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University, 208 Friedl of non-European refigurations of the global,” all of this would Building, Box 90091, Durham, North Carolina 27708, U.S.A. be greatly strengthened had Ong resisted some simplifications ([email protected]). 24 II 12 of her own. “Art critics,” and sometimes “New York critics,” are the Everyone is looking for something in the Chinese artist— beˆte noire of Ong’s piece, and some do, as she says, describe hero, survivor of a government crackdown, champion of the the work of contemporary Chinese artists as sham avant- marginalized, master, friend, and lover. Many are after the gardism, blatant commercialism, or even veiled propaganda, next success story—that artist who might sell a piece on the but critics seldom speak with one voice, and others seem cheap and one day fetch a million dollars at a Sotheby auction. genuinely intrigued. Where critics repeatedly express puzzle- With this provocative essay, Aihwa Ong examines emergent ment that Cai Guo-Qiang or even the overtly dissident Ai global art spaces of capital, desire, and discourse. She calls for a new anthropology of Chinese art criticism, much of Weiwei can be simultaneously Chinese and cosmopolitan, which has failed to see how Chinese artists are creatively critical and deeply patriotic, some among them seem genu- reconfiguring the global. She also provides us with a kind of inely intrigued by the capacity of this work to shake their manifesto for how not to read the politics of the artist. own preconceptions about a place called “China” (e.g., Cotter Ong’s intervention operates on many levels. As she details, 2008, 2011; Lubow 2008). When Peter Schjeldahl (2008), writ- the global Chinese art scene is about many things, but her ing in the New Yorker, describes his own feeling of “provin- main concern is the critics and experts who organize, stage, ciality” on meeting Cai, “of blinking in the face of an intricate and interpret the meaning of a piece of art or an exhibition, sophistication that is grounded elsewhere,” he seems to be thus her detailed focus on Cai Guo-Qiang’s Guggenheim ex- navigating Ong’s reconfigured world map. A more nuanced hibit and the buzz that surrounded it. Ong probes the liberal reading of art reviews and the possibility that at least some art scene’s obsession with finding artists and elevating them critics “get it” would actually support Ong’s notion of border- as antistate dissidents, and she shows how Chinese artists are rupturing experimentations, testifying to the world-remap- often seen as commercial fakes or altogether inauthentic Chi- ping power of the work that she engages in her own com- nese. She is critical of the tendency to see Chinese artists as mentary. participants in a progressive global civil society. These ways In staking her own space, Ong is dismissive of the anthro- of “framing” Chinese art, she argues, are inadequate to the pology of art and apparently has not drunk deeply from this task of making sense of what artists such as Cai do when they well. She observes that this field is concerned with the “au- make art: undoing universalist thinking, disposing of well- thenticity” of “primitive art,” perhaps not realizing that far worn binaries, reconfiguring the global. from policing this boundary, the work of Enid Schildkrout I find Ong’s arguments compelling. Questions remain, and Curtis A. Keim (1990), Ruth Phillips (1999), Christopher however. Does the attention to the assumptions and discursive Steiner (1994), and others has done much to productively orderings of the critic constitute a sufficient ethnographic muddle it. Nor is the anthropology of art solely concerned entanglement with the global scene of modern Chinese art? with the morphing of ethnographic artifacts into museum Does the critic always write in English? What of art criticism pieces, although much good work has been done on this topic. that circulates throughout the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan? Does it traffic in the same universalisms and binaries? If part The project initiated by Marcus and Myers (1995) also con- of the project is to consider “how non-Europeans and Eu- siders the context of art consumption: the markets where art ropeans [encounter] each other as equivalent actors,” then circulates and the deployment of power within them (e.g., we also have to consider encounters in multiple languages, Geismar 2001). Ong’s throwaway comment about the gate- locations, and scenes. I have often wandered into art “hap- keeping role of foreign curators and collectors seems naive penings,” heady openings, and walked the back alleys of artist in the reconfigured universe that she invites us to contemplate: enclaves in Beijing and other cities in China. In these varied Chinese artists exhibit in MOMA, the Tate Modern, and the spaces one finds all kinds of characters and practices. We see Guggenheim; Art Basil takes on a Hong Kong venue, art fairs young entrepreneurs and experts on Chinese art, some Eu- and new art districts sprout up in Asian cities, contemporary ropean, most not. They raise capital to open galleries, create Asian works command record prices in major auction houses, salons to discuss art; many travel the world, hopping exhibits. and Chinese buyers are visible players in all of these devel- Expat connoisseurs of Chinese art mingle with hipster Chinese opments. The anthropology of art seems well positioned to artists; languages, knowledges, dollars, and market skill all take on the ethnographic challenge of these developments. mix and collide in these spaces of encounter. These spaces Ong’s essay—focused primarily on the art itself—should en- surely have something to tell us about other ways in which ergize such a project, and the combustion of these two ap- the global is being reconfigured. proaches could be most illuminating. How does the critic read the politics of the artist? Ong argues

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.230 on Tue, 20 Nov 2012 12:00:00 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Ong “What Marco Polo Forgot”: Contemporary Chinese Art Reconfigures the Global 487 it is a mistake to find in artists such as Cai the making of a huge factory complex; his ethnography offers invaluable per- progressive global civil society, where the multitude is said to spective on the mixed entrepreneurial/aesthetic/critical mo- linger, remaking the world. The real object of critique here tives of the Chinese artistic avant-garde outside the heated, is not just the art critic but also the work of Hardt and Negri. fearful cultural politics of their reception in Euro-American Where Hardt and Negri might lead some to see the inter- art writing and commentary). national art exhibit as a space for the articulation of a com- So, how do the contemporary practices and ambitions of mon political project, Ong sees their brand of theory enabling an anthropology of the contemporary (cf. Rabinow et al. a global-national binary and the reassertion of universal val- 2008) align themselves with those of conceptual art, specifi- ues. This is a point for further debate. In this context, I do cally, the distinctive variety of it being produced by the cos- not see much value in going after Hardt and Negri. Rather, mopolitan and successful Chinese artists that Ong discusses? I think it makes more sense—which is what she does so well More seems to be at stake than an ethnographic interest in in this essay—to focus on how some curators and critics, in a global art world phenomenon coming out of China. Is “the their relentless search for the political potentialities of modern circulation of contemporary artists exercising novel ideas in Chinese art, traffic in all kinds of high theory, which they spaces of global encounter” a model for ethnographic method may or may not understand. Writing against the figure of the as well as a subject of it? global multiple, Ong wants us to discard, once and for all, Though anthropologists and artists have very different pub- the global-national binary. For this framework, she asserts, lics, accountabilities, and forms of expression, they seem to forces us to read artists such as Cai and Ai Weiwei as either share deeper affinities of purpose and practice. “Conceptual agents of the global multitude or always in an oppositional art,” as Ong argues, “as both ideas and critique, can be viewed stance to the Chinese state. Neither does justice to the com- as a distinctive kind of anticipatory politics that engages a plexity of their work and the worlds they inhabit. given situation as a question; that is, it is an art that simul- In the end, Ong wants us to see—one is tempted to say, taneously ruptures familiar modes of reasoning while antic- liberate—these artists outside and beyond the narrative con- ipating emerging problems.” This sounds a lot like latter-day fines, the prison house, of Western universals and the phil- “anthropology as cultural critique,” having located its ex- osophical traditions of liberalism. Hers is a vision of the artist pressions and purposes precisely in the same anticipatory tem- as Taoist alchemist, blending styles, traditions, structure and porality of the contemporary as have the Chinese artists that form, East and West, the economic and the political, the Ong describes. While, of course, conceptual artists and eth- complicit and the antagonistic. Cai and others are creating nographers are not the same (see especially Foster 1995; new mappings of the world, new geographies of time and Marcus 2010), they crucially share an ethos of experimen- space, and a new political sensibility that is decidedly not tation, perhaps more derivative of the former by the latter. reflective of a singular identity, history, or particularity. Their By interpretative fiat that makes them subject to the ethnog- work is indeed anticipatory of something new, perhaps of a rapher’s gaze, and the artists become the surrogates of an- radically contingent and unpredictable mode of being and thropologists in contexts of spectacle and bold public appeal. acting in the world. Let us hope this mode of being and acting Yet, posing this affinity between the intellectual work of con- in the world continues to stir up trouble. ceptual artists and that of ethnographers does not necessarily suggest partnership or collaboration, though those are possible and have occurred (Calzadilla and Marcus 2006; Kester 2011; Marcus 2008, 2010; Papastergiadis 2012). Rather, it does suggest a trading zone of methods (Galison 1997) in which George E. Marcus ethnographers in their own tradecraft might be encouraged Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine, Cal- to ask what of the artists’ practices, designs, and stratagems ifornia 92697, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 10 III 12 in producing spectacle might be incorporated in the far more I want to explore briefly one set of issues stimulated by Aihwa low-key ethnographic research process. In her essay, Ong pro- Ong’s essay that concerns a relation of paraethnography, so vides the impetus and some of the language to encourage to speak. Because of the strict word limit on CA comments, such an exchange or, at this juncture, such an appropriation I am unable to develop a second set of issues that concerns by ethnographers with the imagination for it and when the the straightforward dimensions of an ethnography of Chinese opportunity arises. artists in the scope of the distinctive art worlds in which they Recently, in connection with a team ethnography project are situated and which they constitute for themselves, but I situated in the headquarters villa of the World Trade Orga- just wanted to place it on the agenda for future discussion nization in Geneva (Abe´le`s 2011a), I worked out a feasible of this very rich essay (with the example of work by Myers design for an installation as an intervention in fieldwork [2002] in mind and, more recently, that of the narrative eth- (Marcus, forthcoming) that had become significantly blocked nography by Marc Abe´le`s [2011b], of his experiences in Bei- by a culture of diplomatic discretion and secrecy (see Deeb jing’s leading artist district, Pe´kin 798, occupying a former and Marcus 2011). We had considerable access but not

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.230 on Tue, 20 Nov 2012 12:00:00 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 488 Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 4, August 2012 enough to overcome the formidable and contradictory con- conceptual binaries that form the basis of a habitual way of straints that policies of transparency imposed on us. The con- thinking through compartmentalization (i.e., cosmopolitan trolled spectacle of the installation artist within the space of vs. national patriot, avant-garde vs. authentically indigenous, fieldwork promised to generate “data”—talk, reception, di- civil society vs. authoritarian state, and so on). In developing rected engagement on the part of our subjects—crucial to the notion of “anticipatory politics” and pondering the new ethnography but otherwise blocked by the invisibilities of political possibilities that the twenty-first century offers, Ong transparency. Something like a controlled version of Cai’s act highlights the techniques of assemblage and juxtaposition as of conceptual art in Venice, for example, is possible within a way of understanding the contemporary world. These the- ethnography. oretical insights, however, do not come from abstract claims; Perhaps this play within ethnographic method in terms of rather, they emerge from her careful reading of the artworks the practices and imaginaries of conceptual art is occasional by Cai Guo-Qiang, an influential traveling contemporary Chi- and serendipitous and does not have much a future. More nese artist. Further, the divergent and controversial interpre- likely, as in Ong’s suggestive arguments, is a capacity to per- tations of Cai’s bold art raise another important question form the ethnographic imaginary vicariously through what about what is considered commensurable and incommen- conceptual artists are able to do—but ethnographers are not. surable in the politics of identity today. Artists such as Cai They share an ethos with an anthropology of the contem- frequently disrupt the logic of Western identity politics by porary, but they are operators for it in ways that ethnogra- refusing to follow the either/or mode of identification and phers mostly cannot be, who look on with admiration and, categorization that does not allow the possibility of one si- perhaps, envy. As Ong concludes, “Because anticipatory po- multaneously inhabiting multiple positions or speaking in litical art operates in the vector space that takes multiple sites diverse voices (i.e., being a genuine cosmopolitan artist and as points of reference, it makes conflicts more visible, and an authentic Chinese patriot, drawing from and glorifying engages in a ‘continuous criticism’ . . . of institutionalized certain Chinese cultural elements while not being afraid of relationships. It crystallizes conditions for reenvisioning the making cultural critique). world as heterogeneous and always in motion.” This sounds Yet, a hegemonic paradigm of thinking about the world like what the project of the ethnography of the contemporary and politics as shaped by unequal power relations and uneven would do if it could. Art is thus a spectacular extension of capitalist development continues to exist even though non- the more subtle ethnographic, or a possible model for it. Euro/American conceptual artists among others have begun What, then, is the proper or possible relation of anthropol- to challenge this dominant and often taken-for-granted ogists to such artists, if the latter are to be more than just framework. While fully recognizing the significance of this the subjects of second-order ethnographic observation and new critical trend and potential, I wonder whether Ong’s commentary? reading is a bit overly optimistic about the degree and extent of the impact such avant-garde artists might have. It seems to me that there is a long way to go before we reach the point where such challenges and cultural negotiations can take root among a broader social spectrum at home and abroad and Li Zhang thus destabilize the established global order of things. But Department of Anthropology, University of California, 311 Young precisely for this reason, I agree with Ong that contemporary Hall, One Shields Avenue, Davis, California 95616, U.S.A. anthropologists can and should play a more prominent role ([email protected]). 13 II 12 in fostering a radically different way of thinking about the I read this provocative and well-crafted article with great in- world and envisioning a different future for a larger public. terest. As in most of her previous publications, Aihwa Ong While the article largely focuses on how contemporary Chi- is never satisfied with focusing on specific ethnographic cases nese art can serve as a means of global intervention, it also of merely one place or group; instead, she asks important big raises a crucial question of how it might alter the politics at questions confronting anthropologists and other researchers home. Like Cai, several other internationally recognized Chi- today across different regions. Her incisive analysis and bold nese artists all have a delicate and complex relationship with thinking provide us with productive interventions in current a state that itself is also undergoing transformations. Yet, as debates on the shifting global configuration of power relations Ong rightly points out, such a complex relationship is often and identity, cosmopolitanism, and the cultural politics of not adequately recognized by ideologically driven Western contemporary art. critiques that characterize any artistic participation in state- “What Marco Polo Forgot” is a piece of original and re- orchestrated projects (such as the 2008 Beijing Olympics) as freshing scholarship that urges us to rethink global connec- a sign of “selling out.” Building on her observation, I would tions through the lens of contemporary Chinese art at a time like to take the argument even further. The notion of “selling when China is gaining an increasingly prominent position on out” here suggests a mechanical one-way perspective on the world stage. It effectively challenges a series of entrenched power and social change in postsocialist China shaped by the

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.230 on Tue, 20 Nov 2012 12:00:00 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Ong “What Marco Polo Forgot”: Contemporary Chinese Art Reconfigures the Global 489 lens of authoritarianism. For these critics, the Chinese state be. People expect him to present his art to change the Western remains a powerful figure that can co-opt even critical social perception of China instead of selling China to satisfy the actors into its nationalistic projects with the lure of personal Western media. fame and status. This interpretation fails to acknowledge the Thus, Cai has been trapped in a dilemma between both possibility that the operating mode of state power is also sides due to his dualistic position as a pure avant-garde artist shifting and that such high-profile participants are also able or a pure patriotic artist. There is a popular Chinese saying to transform partly the meanings of the projects involved. that influences the current generation of Chinese, which is “a Entrepreneurialism and political ambitions need not be mu- person’s character decides his destiny” (xingge jueding min- tually exclusive for both the state and the artists. Another gyun). Being a global artist, Cai is trying to pave a way beyond intriguing issue explored in the article that could be unpacked borders, of playing the Chinese role to shape Western per- further is the unstable and sometimes unpredictable relation- ceptions of China. Being a Chinese cosmopolitan artist, he ship between market value and political stance, economic aims to search for a middle way in the process of dialogue capital and social capital for conceptual artists. between the world and China. This approach is very close to I have no doubt that Ong’s article will appeal to a broad the Confucian’s ideology of “Doctrine of the Mean.” Through readership and stimulate further exciting and meaningful de- his work, consciously or unconsciously, he presents the artistic bates among scholars, artists, and the general public about idea of value. Thus, as Ong states, Cai’s experience with the how better to grapple with the complex conditions and new world develops his lifelong pursuit of the artist career, which possibilities of contemporary human existence through new connects to the past, the contemporary, and the future. social imaginations and novel conceptions of the world. As The critics from both sides (China and the global) and his Walter Benjamin reminded us a long time ago, art has great encounter with curators have forced him to create a certain potential to transform politics and engender profound social “emergent identity.” Being a cosmopolitan artist does not change. mean that he has a position to be both a border-crossing artist and simply a man. Cai’s dream to be “a normal person” exactly presents his way of looking at the world and his art. He is presenting his emergent identity to the world through his “anticipatory” political position by “the dualistic percep- Yujie Zhu tion that Chinese experimental art can be celebrated for its Cluster of Asia and Europe in a Global Context, Karl Jaspers Cen- tre for Advanced Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University, cosmopolitanism or rejected out of concerns of its propa- Voßstraße 2, Building 4400, 69115 Heidelberg, Germany (yujie@ ganda or mere art entrepreneurialism.” asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de). 22 II 12 In Ong’s article, the Beijing Olympic opening ceremony perfectly presents this dualistic position and the complexity of identity. The event, presented by three leading Chinese What Can We Bring to the World? artists, Zhang Yimo, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Ai Weiwei, showed As a China-born global artist, Cai Guo-Qiang is widely dis- the asymmetrical power relationship between both sides of cussed, especially after the first success of his work Bring to the media and the dialogue between the world and China. If Venice What Marco Polo Forgot in 1995. Cai’s work has been Zhang presented the voice from the Chinese authority and criticized by both Western and Chinese art critics, and he was Ai used his idea of freedom “of any obstructions of traditional even sued in 2000 for his work Rent Collection Courtyard. notions” to refuse the contemporary China politics, Cai’s at- Different from solely looking at the circulation of art, Aihwa titude and his work indicate his identity as a mediator. His Ong uses an alternative approach to provide insight into the approach showed the possibility to make a novel idea in the notion of the circulation of the artist, Cai’s ideas in spaces space of global encounter and “methodolize” his experience of the global encounter. This approach, similar to Latour’s to observe and present the world, without being politically actor-network theory, aims to use the network of Cai to il- for or against China. lustrate the asymmetrical power relation between the Chinese Ong’s work does more than call for an anthropological and Western media and the Chinese artist’s position in this engagement with art criticism as a cointerpreter. Her approach dynamic relationship. raises a similar question of being both a Chinese anthropol- As Ong points out, the different gazes of the Chinese and ogist and a global anthropologist, that is, how to play the role Western critics are based on their expectation of how the as a mediator for both Western and Chinese academia. Similar global Chinese artist should present. When Western critics to Cai’s case, the border-crossing identity leads such anthro- focus mainly on the authenticity of the art by judging him pologists to acquire a dualistic position. Their work can be as a “showman and sham artist,” they expect him to be an interpreted as selling Western theories by the Chinese do- “independent, creative, and political agent.” On the contrary, mestic scholars or criticized as inauthentic without touching the Chinese media, especially the Chinese artists, have their the real ground by the Western scholars. Is it possible, as Cai’s own imaginaries of how Chinese-born global artists should story illustrates, to use what they have learned and their cos-

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.230 on Tue, 20 Nov 2012 12:00:00 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 490 Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 4, August 2012 mopolitan experience and tradition, to present to both Chi- buyers or critics who may not “get” the messages embedded nese and global academia? It seems that the Chinese global in Cai’s artworks. She captures the fluid ambiguity of the artists or scholars can hardly be understood as “normal” peo- artists, intended perhaps not to fully disclose the “history ple. Nevertheless, their continuous struggle with the situation lessons” but rather to disrupt Western expectations of political will never end. Thus, we return to the first question put opposition or resistance in the installations. The political sig- forward by Ong: What we can bring to the world and to the nificance of Chinese art is less in embedded cultural messages global? than in the act of challenging Western definitions of cosmopolitan norms. When it comes to potential audiences in the People’s Re- public, comments focus on the limits of artistic subversions among the public. Obviously, international exhibitions are still mainly the stuff of elite cultural exchange. I agree with Sara Reply Friedman and Zhang Li that the masses in China may not The above comments richly expand the conversation on con- grasp any challenges to nationalist sentiments posed by Cai temporary art on the world stage. In the essay, Cai Quo- or Ai Weiwei in their various works. Qiang’s 2008 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum was the Rather, my point is that major Chinese artists are also event that crystallized contested meanings of the global. I playing subterfuge with categories of the national and the deployed the global in many registers: as concepts of hetero- international among intellectuals and politicians at home. In- geneity and exchange and as emerging configurations of cos- stead of anticipating “optimistic” effects of such artists (Zhang), my attention is on the play of strategies that may mopolitanism. The plunge of world-famous Chinese artists alternate between the alignment and the disarticulation of into the New York art scene also raises broader questions artistic “entrepreneurialism and political ambitions” (Zhang). about an anthropology of the global. I accept the invitation In short, when it comes to the Chinese milieu of art reception, to expand on the anticipatory strategies—crouching in the I do not claim the artworks in question are transforming wings, rupturing borders, messing with the props, and casting politics “on the ground” (Friedman) or challenging the idiom spells—that deploy things Chinese as a global method. of “contemporary political economy” (Chumley). Rather, I merely wish to highlight the role of artists in shaking up Double Positioning conventional mappings of national and global spaces and how Mobile artists not only rupture national borders but also re- we may think about cosmopolitanism today. cast them in relation to shifting norms of cosmopolitan art. The Cai exhibition is the event and the field through which Anticipatory Politics contemporary Chinese art negotiates the forms, meanings, and experiences of cosmopolitanism. Remarks on the double The politics of Cai and his colleagues therefore both disorder positioning of mobile artists identify different kinds of cul- and reorder geopolitical definitions of what is modern, con- tural sophistication in two very different milieus—New York, temporary, and global in art. I am not able to examine the China—and what the effects of the artworks may be. burgeoning inter-Asian art markets, but New York is the pre- It should be clear to the attentive reader that my focus is eminent global site of art as “capital, desire, and discourse,” on specific responses to Cai’s art at the Guggenheim and not as Ralph Litzinger notes. By staging their works in New York on implicating all New York curators and media scholars. (rather than, say, Hong Kong), Chinese artists co-construct From her perch at the Museum of Natural History, Laurel art cosmopolitanism beyond the “prison house” of “Western Kendall doubtlessly has a privileged view she is free to elab- universals and the philosophical traditions of liberalism” (Lit- orate upon, but it is not the subject of my essay. I have a zinger). Indeed, there is perhaps no “correct” way to interpret sense of the New York–Chinese art world. My sister works at the work; the politics of anticipation surround how the in- Wildenstein, New York City, which in 2008 opened a gallery trusion of Chinese artists into an elite West media center can in Beijing devoted to works by artists such as Zhang Xiaogang stir up unease and unsettling feelings about one’s location in (see Ong 2010). This is a fairly new phenomenon. While there the shifting terrain and practices of contemporary art. is a contemporary Asian art expert, Melissa Chiu of the Asia Here the comments suggest two ways of thinking about Society Museum, the Guggenheim Museum is the first of its the reframing of the global. First, paraphrasing Marshall Mc- kind to only recently hire a senior curator of Asian art and Luhan, is contemporary art a particular instantiation of “the to seek exchanges with contemporary artists working in the medium is the message”? Is the reconfiguration of the global developing world. context more politically fraught than the content of the art More on target are remarks on how border-running artists itself? experience limits of interpretation by respective audiences. Second, when it comes to the definition of modern Chinese Lily Chumley identifies “the politics of desire” among Western art, the politics of reflecting on the past moves forward by

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.230 on Tue, 20 Nov 2012 12:00:00 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Figure 8. Jacob Ki Nielsen, Ph.D. fellow, Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen, Urban Imaginaries poster, 2012. A color version of this ﬁgure is available in the online edition of Current Anthropology.

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.230 on Tue, 20 Nov 2012 12:00:00 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 492 Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 4, August 2012 engaging non-Chinese forms or styles of art. Such anticipatory that destabilize concepts and social arrangements but also politics unsettle what is “Chinese” at home and in the world, conjure up new configurations of politics, ethics, and sociality. as well as conventional reception in international settings. So, while I greatly admire the incandescent effect of Cai’s works on multiple publics, I am not proposing that the an- What Can China Bring to the World? thropologist borrows the artist’s arrows for our decidedly less flamboyant display of “the ethnographic imagination.” Whose As different commentators note, by seeking to slip by judg- imagination, and from which vantage point have we collec- ments of what is commensurable or incommensurable in art tively been imagining the changing world? The ethos of ex- practice, content, identity, and media power, the Chinese artist perimentation is coming from sites undergoing great trans- operates as a mediator of value in the space of global en- formation. The anthropological method is challenged by an counter. Yujie Zhu notes, in the search for a “dialogue between array of startling changes and novel configurations not an- the world and China,” Cai seems to pose the question “What ticipated in older frameworks, concepts, and obsessions. I can we bring to the world?” Zhu seems to invite me to say therefore see the anthropologist not as an envious bystander more about China as an unsettling and dispersing gesture. but rather a cosmopolitan cointerpreter and comediator of Cai’s shamanistic style seamlessly circumvents old borders and cosmopolitan artists. Exercising different sets of skills, an- heals old wounds of East-West encounters. He returns ghosts thropologists and artists are engaged in contemporary venues, to the past (ghosts of Western obsessions about China, the having vital roles in molding international cultural conver- universal, as well as ghosts of Chinese narratives of the West, sation and understanding (see Ong 2011a). cultural revolution, national identity, etc.). Cai’s works per- One kind of cosmopolitan ethnographic approach can in- form Daoist flows of nowhere and everywhere, rupturing la- volve the study of art projects in an unstable field of power bels that fix us to places and identities. His installations enact that includes artists, collectors, curators, and critics. The in- the dance of dualities and the interplay of concepts and non- teractions of commentaries, political goals, and cultural sen- concepts in a constant process of appearance, animation, and sibilities shape emerging global forms that anticipate our over- creation. Beyond the works described in the essay, Cai’s gun- lapping futures. It has been some time since the Cai powder paintings, mushroom imageries, and fireworks art Guggenheim exhibition in 2008, but the sense of China’s express an animistic energy that unsettles spatial and temporal expansion into international art shows is still relatively novel. orders in suggesting a world without beginning or end. Can Recently, the New York Times reports on the intrusion of Daoist sensibility, a kind of thermodynamic theory of the Chinese art into major New York museums, citing the reaction world, deconstruct contemporary cosmopolitanism and an- of Fan D’ian, the director of the National Art Museum in imate a rethinking of the global contemporary? Shanghai: “For the Western point of view, the 20th century is Western art, and the art of Modernism. I don’t think that is fair. These days, when Western scholars discuss modernity, The Cosmopolitan Anthropologist they should also discuss Chinese modernity” (Perlez 2012). George Marcus poses a provocative question of what is at These comments, perhaps, are pertinent as well for an an- stake in an anthropological encounter with novel contem- thropology that would be contemporary. porary art. “Is ’the circulation of contemporary artists exer- From the vantage point of Southeast Asia as well, the sense cising novel ideas in spaces of global encounter’ a model for of being poised at a momentous juncture is palpable. On his ethnographic method as well as a subject of it?” return trip to Venice, Marco Polo in 1292 stopped in Sumatra The question triggers another one. Are not anthropologists and discovered evidence of Islamic culture. In 1511, Afonso presumed already to be cosmopolitan researchers, experi- de Albuquerque arrived in Malacca (bearing gunpowder that menting with appropriate tools for studying globalized situ- Marco Polo had encountered in China) and set off the first ations? Like mobile artists, anthropologists unsettle designated salvo in the centuries-long Western rule of huge swaths of spaces (of culture, resistance, human rights, and power) by South and East Asia. Five decades later, in 2011, Asian leaders being attentive to practices and ideas that shape emerging quietly noted the end of the long shadow of Western dom- spaces of the global. My view on contemporary ethnography ination of the region. The future, as reflected in the spectacular is that one needs to be skeptical of some of the hype and the skylines of Asian cities, is being reimagined rather differently misnomer surrounding “ethnography” (the “ethnos” within than through the lens of the past (see Ong 2011b). the disciplinary confines of territory, race, or culture has been For the cosmopolitan anthropologist, truly significant destabilized). Rather, stripped of its more precious claims, the cross-cultural debates, whether in art, anthropology, or the anthropological method is vitally based on (first- and second- social sciences more broadly, are haunted by the ghost of order) observations, a low-flying technique that Stephen Col- civilizations vanquished and resurgent powers in contem- lier and I have called staying “close to practices” (Collier and porary times. New ethnographic sophistication is needed to Ong 2005). Instead of describing an ethnos, anthropological grasp complex social practices circulating in heterogeneous observations track the variability of practices and strategies sites and conversations. For instance, by putting old ghosts

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.230 on Tue, 20 Nov 2012 12:00:00 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Ong “What Marco Polo Forgot”: Contemporary Chinese Art Reconfigures the Global 493 to rest, do contemporary Asian artists also rethink “civiliza- In The anthropology of globalization. Jonathan X. Inda and Renato Rosaldo, eds. Pp. 1–34. Malden, MA: Blackwell. tion” as a modern force in Asia’s modernity (see Chakrabarty Jay, Martin. 2006. Review of Adorno and the political by Espen Hammer, 2005. 2012)? Cai was born in 1957, in the ancient seaport of Quan- Notre Dame Philosophical Review, May 12. http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm p zhou on the southern Chinese coast. It is richly ironic that ?id 6604. Kester, Grant H. 2011. The one and the many: contemporary collaborative art his personal name, as Friedman points out, means “nation in a global context. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 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